st: Re: Pass Integers to Program

["Michael Blasnik" <michael.blasnik@verizon.net>]

...
It would be easiest to make this a "required" option because you could then use 
the numlist syntax.

syntax ..., values(numlist min=1 max=49 integer ascending)

To check that there are exactly 6 arguments, you could then code:

local nints: word count `values'
if `nints'!=6 {
 noi di as err "values option must contain 6 integers"
 exit 198
}

The ascending option requires that the numlist be ascending, but you could 
specify the sort option to make it automatically sorted.

Michael Blasnik

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin Weiss" <martin.weiss@uni-tuebingen.de>
To: <statalist@hsphsun2.harvard.edu>
Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2008 6:22 PM
Subject: st: Pass Integers to Program



> Hi guys,
>
> this may be easy for the advanced Stata users typically populating the
> Statalist, but I have now spent the better part of the afternoon trying to
> pass six integers as mandatory arguments to a program, and then have the
> program check whether there are six integers, in ascending order (if not,
> please sort), greater than zero and smaller than 50. I subsequently want to
> refer to them as arg1, arg2...
> I understand this is possible with positional arguments, but I do not know
> how to check for completeness and ascending order then. So I have been
> reading -syntax- in the [U]Programming up and down all day, but this
> explanation, though  stretching over pages, has left me even more clueless
> as to the correct specification. Particularly worrying is the part where
> they refer to "anything" on page 411, where, in my view, the whole
> description is not intelligible. I addition, there are no real examples in
> this part of the handbook. Man, I am looking forward to a good book on Stata
> programming...
>
> Thanxx for any ideas in advance,
> Martin Weiss
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